The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enríquez, trans by Megan McDowell
“Was it a nocturnal butterfly or a moth? She had never been able to tell the difference. But one thing was sure: nighttime butterflies turned to dust in your fingers, as if they had no organs or blood, almost like the still cigarette ash in the ashtray if you barely touched it.”
While The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (2021) is the newer of releases in English from Argentinian writer Mariana Enríquez, it’s actually a collection of her earlier work that took longer to be translated than Things We Lost in the Fire (2016). I’m yet to read the latter, but if it is anything like this (and as several Goodreads reviewers tell me - it surpasses what Enríquez has started here), then I cannot wait to get my hands on it.
Across twelve short stories, Enríquez manages to walk that perfect line in psychological horror where the ‘scary’ things become nothing in comparison to the reality of what humans are capable of. Ghosts, monsters and the unknown pale in comparison to the macabre antics of the fictional humans Enríquez creates.
Nothing is sacred or spared invitation, and it feels important to warn readers that these stories cover murder, dead babies, cannibalism, child sex trafficking, suicide and a wide spectrum of fetish behaviours (amongst other dark themes).
Yet, despite the nature of many of these stories, there is often an absurd joviality.
In the opening story, Angelita Unearthed, our narrator is haunted by the ghost of a rotting dead baby, believed to be her great-aunt, who was buried in the backyard of her old family home. The home has since changed hands; our narrator believes if she can recover the bones of the angel baby, perhaps she will finally be at rest. But nothing is further from the truth:
“I asked her if now she was at peace and if she would leave, if she was going to leave me alone. She shook her head no.”
In this simple revelation, Enríquez lets us in on a dark secret for what is to come - that no one and nothing is going to play into our expectations, and you will find no tropes here.
One of my favourite stories in the collection, Where Are You, Dear Heart? follows the escapades of a narrator who has developed a fetish for listening to irregular heartbeats. She chases down recordings on the internet to feed her needs until she finally tracks down and meets one of the individuals who submits the recordings:
“Soon, we both abandoned the online life, and we locked ourselves in my room with a sound recorder, a stethoscope, medicines and substances that helped change his cardiac rhythm. We both knew how it could end, and we didn’t care.”
There’s so much ground to cover here, and I don’t want to give too much away, as many of these stories simply left me stunned. As such, it’s a collection worth diving into without too much of a heads-up. Enríquez's incredible capacity for visceral writing had me doing double takes and re-reads:
"The sheets were impregnated with the smell of chicken cutlets."
"The girls had opened the casket to feed on Espina's remains with devotion and disgust; around the grave, pools of vomit bore witness to their efforts."
“We were scared, but fear doesn’t look the same as desperation.”
In attempts to be provocative or shocking, I've often found some writers go too far, and the trauma feels piled on and unnecessary. While these stories push boundaries, it (oddly) never feels exploitative. In a recent interview, Enríquez advised, “When I make horror, I try to make it Latin American. To reimagine the subjects in accordance with our realities, to include indigenous mythologies, local urban legends, pagan saints, local murderers, the violence we live with, the social problems we suffer.”
It’s this daily violence and ignorance of social problems that screams loudly in her work.
Enríquez is known for her sociopolitical writing about her hometown of Buenos Aires. Eleven stories in this collection are set there, with the twelfth story set in Barcelona. In particular, the spectre of recent dictatorships has left its mark on a society governed by silence and fear. In Back When We Talked to the Dead, five girls use an Ouija board to reach out to those they want to communicate with, gaining confirmation of their suspicions that one of their friends' parents were ‘disappeared’ as part of the regime:
“The thing was that everyone knew Julita’s parents hadn’t died in any accident: Julita’s folks had disappeared. They were disappeared. They’d been disappeared. We didn’t really know the right way to say it.”
One of the things that stood out for me throughout was the evocative sense of place Enríquez can deliver. While reading these stories, I felt fully immersed in the settings, as Enríquez describes in rich detail the taste of the air, the pulsing heat, the sour smells - it’s difficult not to find yourself pulled into the thick of it.
According to Sigmund Freud, dreams are the road to our unconscious desires, terrors and needs. The place where everything we dare not act on, in reality, is allowed to run visceral and wild. This is where Mariana Enríquez’s stories start from - but it is not where they end. Enríquez does the dirty on us and brings the unconscious vividly into reality, presenting us with a collection that blurs the boundaries leaving us to beg the question: how much of this is real?
In Enríquez’s world, I’m not sure I want to know.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in nipaluna (Hobart), Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
